I read lately in a well-known medical journal, speaking of the “Nightingale Nurses,” that the day is quite gone by when a novel would give a caricature of a Nurse as a “Mrs. Gamp”—drinking, brutal, ignorant, coarse old woman. The “Nightingale Nurse” in a novel, it said, would be—what do you think?—an active, useful, clever Nurse. These are the parts I approve of. But what else do you think?—a lively, rather pert, and very conceited young woman. Ah, there’s the rub. You see what our name is “up” for in the world. That’s what I should like to be left out. This is what a friendly critic says of us, and we may be very sure that unfriendly critics say much worse. Do we deserve what they say of us? That is the question. Let us not have, each one of us, to say “yes” in our own hearts. Christ made no light matter of conceit.
Keep the usefulness, and let the conceit go.
And may I here say a few words of counsel to those who may be called upon to be Night Nurses? One of these asked me with tears to pray for her. I do pray for all of you, our dear Night Nurses. In my restless nights my thoughts turn to you incessantly by the bedsides of restless and suffering Patients, and I pray God that He will make, thro’ you, thro’ your patience, your skill, your hope, faith and charity, every Ward into a Church, and teach us that to be the Gospel is the only way to “preach the Gospel,” which Christ tells us is the duty of every one of us “unto the end of the world”—every woman and Nurse of us all; and that a collection of any people trying to live like Christ is a Church. Did you ever think how Christ was a Nurse, and stood by the bed, and with His own hands nursed and “did for” the sufferers?
But, to return to those who may be called upon to be Night Nurses: do not abuse the liberty given you on emerging from the “Home,” where you are cared for as if you were our children. Keep to regular hours by day for your meals, your sleep, your exercise. If you do not, you will never be able to do and stand the night work perfectly; if you do, there is no reason why night nursing may not be as healthy as day. (I used to be very fond of the night when I was a Night Nurse; I know what it is. But then I had my day work to do besides; you have not.) Do not turn dressy in your goings out by day. It is vulgar, it is mean, to burst out into freedom in this way. There are circumstances of peculiar temptation when, after the restraint and motherly care of the “Home,” you, the young ones, are put into circumstances of peculiar liberty. Is it not the time to act like Daniel?... Let “the Judge, the Righteous Judge,” have to call us not the “Pharisees,” but Daniel’s band!
That is what I pray for you, for me, for all of us.
But what is it to be a Daniel’s band? What is God’s command to Night Nurses? It is—is it not?—not to slur over any duty—not the very least of all our duties—as Night Nurse: to be able to give a full, accurate, and minute account of each Patient the next morning: to be strictly reserved in your manner with gentlemen (“Thou God seest me”: no one else); to be honest and true. You don’t know how well the Patients know you, how accurately they judge you. You can do them no good unless they see that you live what you say.
It is: not to go out showily dressed, and not to keep irregular hours with others in the day time.
Dare to have a purpose firm,
Dare to make it known.
Watch—watch. Christ seems to have had a special word for Night Nurses: “I say unto you, watch.” And He says: “Lo, I am with you alway,” when no one else is by.
And he divides us all, at this moment, into the “wise virgins” and the “foolish virgins.” Oh, let Him not find any “foolish virgins” among our Night Nurses! Each Night Nurse has to stand alone in her Ward.